7 Cool Browser Tricks

OperaSpeed Dial Extensions

Who needs Windows 8 Live Tiles? Opera shows you updated info from tiles on its new-tab page, with Speed Dial Extensions. These let you get stock quotes, weather, social updates, and more without navigating to separate sites. As the innovator of so many browser features we've all grown to take for granted—including such basics as tabs and built-in search--Opera offers among the most in unique capabilities. To name a few others, its Turbo feature that speeds up slow connections by using cached, compressed versions of site content; its inclusion of a BitTorrent client and email client, and its support for paged media that turns a website into an ereader.

Unfortunately, Opera recently made an announcement that will reduce choice on the Web: It will use the same underlying page rendering engine as Safari and Chrome, called Webkit. The company, which has a strong presence in mobile but only a small piece of the desktop browser market, claims it will try to influence the development of Webkit and focus on adding even more unique features to its browser.